“Married?”
“Oh, no! He is always alone. Sometimes he comes here and stays for three months, and is never once seen outside the garden. And sometimes for a year he never comes to Beni-Mora. But he is here now. Twenty Arabs are always working in the garden, and at night ten Arabs with guns are always awake, some in a tent inside the door and some among the trees.
“Then there is danger at night?”
“The garden touches the desert, and those who are in the desert without arms are as birds in the air without wings.”
They had come out from among the houses now into a broad, straight road, bordered on the left by land that was under cultivation, by fruit trees, and farther away by giant palms, between whose trunks could be seen the stony reaches of the desert and spurs of grey-blue and faint rose-coloured mountains. On the right was a shady garden with fountains and stone benches, and beyond stood a huge white palace built in the Moorish style, and terraced roofs and a high tower ornamented with green and peacock-blue tiles. In the distance, among more palms, appeared a number of low, flat huts of brown earth. The road, as far as the eyes could see, stretched straight forward through enormous groves of palms, whose feathery tops swayed gently in the light wind that blew from the desert. Upon all things rained a flood of blue and gold. A blinding radiance made all things glad.
“How glorious light is!” Domini exclaimed, as she looked down the road to the point where its whiteness was lost in the moving ocean of the trees.
Batouch assented without enthusiasm, having always lived in the light.
“As we return from the garden we will visit the tower,” he said, pointing to the Moorish palace. “It is a hotel, and is not yet open, but I know the guardian. From the tower Madame will see the whole of Beni-Mora. Here is the negro village.”
They traversed its dusty alleys slowly. On the side where the low brown dwellings threw shadows some of the inhabitants were dreaming or chattering, wrapped in garments of gaudy cotton. Little girls in the fiercest orange colour, with tattooed foreheads and leathern amulets, darted to and fro, chasing each other and shrieking with laughter. Naked babies, whose shaven heads made a warm resting-place for flies, stared at Domini with a lustrous vacancy of expression. At the corners of the alleys unveiled women squatted, grinding corn in primitive hand-mills, or winding wool on wooden sticks. Their heads were covered with plaits of imitation hair made of wool, in which barbaric silver ornaments were fastened, and their black necks and arms jingled with chains and bangles set with squares of red coral and large dull blue and green stones. Some of them called boldly to Batouch, and he answered them with careless impudence. The palm-wood door of one of the houses stood wide open, and Domini looked in. She saw a dark space with floor and walls of earth, a ceiling of palm and brushwood, a low divan of earth without mat or covering of any kind.
“They have no furniture?” she asked Batouch.